I have just finish installing VL 5.9 on a new laptop. I would like to install KDE and upgrade Firefos and Thunderbird to its latest version. How do I go about this? Any help or info would be appreciated.

You need to use the package manager, Slackware Apt. This is gslapt in the GUI or slapt-get at the command line. I'm going to assume you are going to use gslapt, which is in your menu under System Tools.

As you probably noticed neither KDE nor Thunderbird are included so they will be found in our "extra" repository. The latest Firefox, 3.0.1, is still in our "testing" repository and previous versions that came out after the iso was released are in "patches" since they were mostly security fixes. You need to enable those three repositories if they aren't enabled already. Once you're in glsapt click on Edit -> Preferences. In the box that pops up click on the Sources tab. The first four boxes should all be checked. Then click OK. gslapt will then ask if you want to reload the package list. You need to do that.

Once that's done you'll have a complete list of available packages. Type in whatever you like in the search box to find what you're looking for: firefox, thunderbird, kde, etc... You just check off the packages you want and click the Execute icon to install them. gslapt will automatically find and install any dependencies you need. Please note that there isn't a meta package for KDE. You'll need to select all the components you want individually.

Once you're done it's a good idea to go back into the list of repositories and to disable "testing", the fourth box. You're enabling that just to get firefox 3.0.1. It's a bad idea to do system upgrades with testing enabled as that can cause breakage.

(I still find the mozilla-firefox-3.0.1 package in the patches repo, though, together with the firefox-3.0.1 one. Not that it is a problem, as upgrades are possible, but you might want to pull the long-named one out).

Errr... no. The 3.0 package had problems and was pulled. The 3.0.1 package was rebuilt and is just named firefox. It's in patches now and an ordinary upgrade should work.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it seems that wcs's point may have been confobulated because of a typo. I think were wcs put "...because 3.0 and 3.0.1 packages..." was supposed to read "...because 2.0 and 3.01 packages...". Correct me if I'm wrong.

If that's the case, then I think there is not any worries. IIRC, Firefox v2.x and v3.x can exist together without any problems.

(I still find the mozilla-firefox-3.0.1 package in the patches repo, though, together with the firefox-3.0.1 one. Not that it is a problem, as upgrades are possible, but you might want to pull the long-named one out).

Ummm... yeah, Vector did that. I'll send him a note before I change things

Great.I meant 3.0 but that was my mistake, as that package isn't there anymore.

All this package business can get confusing at times.Especially when you don't know if a package is in the repo, because you have it installed but maybe it was taken out.

(incidentally, does anyone know of a quick way to see that using gslapt or slapt-get, without actually navigating to the directories on the repos?Clicking on a package name that I have installed doesn't seem to tell me if it is still on the repo or not....mmm, now that I think about it, if you can click "reinstall", it means that it is still available)

Glad it all worked. In case you didn't notice new Firefox 3.0.2 and Seamonkey 1.1.12 packages were added to the testing repository today. They are security issues in the older versions. You may want to enable the testing repository and do one more set of upgrades.